Over the course of two years (1991 1992), she churned out hundreds of brief letters supposedly written by the likes of No l Coward, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and a host of lesser names from the suburbs of celebrity.Most of the letters are mundane. Lee Israel specialized in forged letters.
Reliant on the artists they imitate, they give off only reflected light. Even so, forgers themselves are seldom captivating figures. Muggings and thefts leave no such doubts. Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is "a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures" ( The New York Times Book Review).SignatureReviewed by Edward DolnickForgery is a strange crime because, until the police show up, the victims never know they've been done wrong.
"Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining… gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics" (The Associated Press). Between 19, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward-and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines.īut by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she'd received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. A major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy-Lee Israel's hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others.īefore turning to her life of crime-running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI-Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies.
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